Purgatory
by Krissy Mae Anderson
Summary: A nurse plays a role in a life of a patient.


_"Purgatory" by K.M. Anderson_

**Summary:** A nurse plays a role in a life of a patient.  
**Rating:** PG-13, just in case. I never understand these ratings...   
**Spoilers: **"Goodbye, Farewell and Amen."  
**Disclaimer:** Nope, not mine. I wish.   
**Acknowledgements: **to Sarah Perry, who read one of the earlier drafts and liked it. Thanks!

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She smiles at the patient who is sitting on the bed, tells him it's time for his medication. He is the age of her father, around forty-five. He doesn't acknowledge her, just looks past her, at something that only he can see. She shakes his shoulder carefully, gets him to notice her and watches as he listlessly swallows the pills that she had brought him. He wears a bathrobe over his pajamas. It is old and frayed, but she can see it was once made of silk, and when she looks closer she can see the patterns of dragons stretching across the old fabric. The man inside the bathrobe reminds her of it – worn out, aged, but mysterious.  
  
She speaks to the other nurses, who are only too keen to share the juicy details. He's a doctor, a surgeon, or at least used to be. He is a frequent flier – he gets better, they have to sign him out and send him home and after a while he is back, with his sad smile and his old bathrobe and his empty eyes, and the whole story repeats. His father commits him here from time to time when he feels too old to take care of him, but after the first week he is usually here voluntarily, for another week or so. They tell her that his father cries when he takes him here, because he remembers his son's sanity and it hurts him to see his son captured by his own mind.  
  
She comes to the patient's room again, determined to talk to him. He stands near the television, his eyes fixed on the screen, where young men and women in summer clothing march with signs against the war. She watches the screen too, and sees young smiling men marching off into the jungle of a faraway country. She comes closer to him, looks at his face, and sees tears flowing down his cheeks, his blue eyes full of a strange mixture of rage and sadness. She leaves, ashamed of having seen something so personal, but is determined to come back.  
  
During a night shift, she does the unethical, looks into his file. First hospitalization – Seoul, Korea, June 1953, battle fatigue or maybe something deeper and more damaging. She looks through the notes, sees that the doctor who treated him then was a friend, was a friend who did all that was necessary, and who was firm in his approach. There is a story about a chicken that mystifies her, and then all of a sudden that hospitalization ends. The rest are back in the States, most of them here, at the same hospital, the same middle-of-the road "psychiatric institution," specializing in long-term psychological illnesses.  
  
The next day she comes to his room again and says hello. He looks up at her, annoyed that she has disturbed his daydreams. She sits down, introduces herself and asks him why he is here, not as a nurse but as a person. He laughs bitterly and asks her if she is new. She admits she is and tells him he's full of shit. He is surprised but says that he likes directness. He shows her a notebook, full of something that looks like scribbles to her. He reads a phrase to her, a phrase made of sounds that are broken as he speaks them and which make his voice crack – "che-sohng-hahm-ni-da". He wants to write a letter to someone in Korea – he doesn't know that person's name or address, but he has been writing and re-writing the letter for years, because he cannot find peace of mind. After telling her about the letter, he seems to feel better, and she brings him some candy. He flirts with her, and she blushes. He talks, and she listens, wondering about the nature of his battle fatigue once again.  
  
After the contraband candy is consumed, he asks her to send a letter for him. The hospital reads the patients' letters before they send them – and he says that he needs this letter to be private. The writing is hurried and smudged – she quickly looks at the address out of curiosity but cannot figure out if the state on the envelope is California, Massachusetts or Georgia. She walks in the rain to the mailbox, the letter safe in her handbag. She thinks of the stories that the patient has told her, of windy days with bombs exploding deafeningly as hands tried to hold onto a life, of summer days when those same hands held onto an empty glass as their owner slept, knocked out by exhaustion. She drops the envelope in the box and walks home. She takes off her jacket, pets her cat and goes to bed, exhausted, still thinking about the letter.  
  
Next morning he is feeling worse. He sits in bed quietly, the notebook lying on the bedside table, and his breakfast untouched on the tray. She asks him if she can do anything to help him and he says she cannot, he wishes that she or someone could, but she cannot. She asks him if the addressee of the letter can do it and he says maybe – the person whom he wrote the letter is/was a good friend but it was so long ago and it was so impossible and it was spur-of-the moment and he does not want his friend to come and wants him to come. She leaves him alone with the white walls of his room and watches the news on the television, watches the news of dead young men with blonde and black hair, and feels deeply confused with the world. And so the days go by, with more dead young men and more_ che-sohng-hahm-ni-da_ in the notebook, and she keeps coming back and talking to her strange patient, coaxing stories of friendship and sadness and impossibility out of him. _  
_   
When she has the weekend off she comes in anyway for half an hour, to see how he is doing. The duty nurse tells her he has been refusing to eat and that he only ate when she threatened to force-feed him – "doctors make horrible patients, honey" – and she goes to his room, where he writes crooked symbols in the notebook as tears slide down his cheeks. She asks him about the notebook, and he asks her if she really wants to know. She says yes and he tells her a story about a bus and a chicken and a baby, a story of the war and the need to ask forgiveness that fills the notebook with the same sentence over and over again. He smiles a grotesque smile and starts writing the symbols again and she walks out of his room and goes into a bathroom, where she stares at the mirror at the reflection she cannot see.  
  
On Monday she comes back to work and runs into a nervous man in a wrinkled suit, fighting with the reception nurse. He tells her the name of the man in the old bathrobe, tells her that he has come to see him, tells her that he is taking him far, far away from this clean purgatory. The nurse scowls at the man through the little plastic window, grasps the dial of the phone with her long, manicured nails and speaks to someone in her shrill, unpleasant, voice. The man finally notices the young woman looking at him and smiles at her nervously. She comes up to him and tells him that she sent the letter, that she is happy he is here. He shakes her hand carefully and tells her that he is very thankful. The reception nurse scowls at him again and tells him that the patient has discharged himself and will be down in a couple of minutes.  
  
She watches the nervous man and thinks of the notebook and the smudged address, wondering where the man has traveled from and who he is going, if he will take her patient to heaven or to hell or to another purgatory. The door opens and the man in the old bathrobe stands on the threshold, looking at his friend with tears flowing down his cheeks. The man in the wrinkled suit runs to him and soon they are embracing, talking at the same time, both crying, both angry at themselves of not having thought of this earlier, and soon they are walking outside, almost forgetting to take the suitcase the orderly had brought down. They walk out, and she watches them disappear, and she can swear they kiss right there in front of the hospital.

She goes back to his room, where the bed is already being changed, and finds the diary and a note on the bedside table. She reads the note, and smiles, knowing that his time in purgatory has ended, and he has gone on to something – heaven or hell or the place where the atheists go, and he only asks for one more favor. She decides to be late for work, and after putting the diary in an envelope, she scribbles "Korea" on the envelope and drops in the same mailbox where she dropped the letter to the man who took the man in the bathrobe away.

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**A/N: **The Korean phrase used is an intense way to say: "I am sorry."


End file.
